How to meter this scenery

[PatrickMarq]

Today at a walk I found a ‘perfect’ subject for a 6x17. Now this subject itself is impossible to meter.

iPhone image is horrible

Thinking of color Portra or E100.
It’s a dark stream with green ‘grasses’ in the water. I’m going to use a polarising filer, and meter through this.
So I can meter of a grey card, use this value
Meter the back water and place this in zone 2 1/2
Meter the grass next to the stream, place this at zone 5

Going to bracket, but like to have the shot ‘perfect’ metered.

[ic-racer]

You may need to hold back the upper shore and burn a little of the foreground grass while printing. I'd meter the upper shore and place on a low zone with some texture. That is standard practice in exposing negative material. An average meter reading would probably be fine too maybe with an extra stop added to ensure some detail in the upper shore.

[PatrickMarq]

You may need to hold back the upper shore and burn a little of the foreground grass while printing. I'd meter the upper shore and place on a low zone with some texture. That is standard practice in exposing negative material. An average meter reading would probably be fine too maybe with an extra stop added to ensure some detail in the upper shore.

Some more explanation of the shot,I was a bit to quickly with my post.
I would only put the stream in the composition, the stream is quite black, and some lichter greens in the stream. The iPhone image is not so good.

[BrianShaw]

Take an incident light reading…

[Alan Klein]

Metering the grass should get you close.

[Kiwi7475]

If you're using E100, my advice and assuming you have a light meter that allows you to do this (if not you'll have to do some mental math): use incident metering, measure two points: the darkest point and the lightest point in the scene, store both in the meter and average them. Don’t worry too much where exactly, just get two points that look like the extremes, you’ll adjust from there anyway. So now that average will get you a shutter speed on the meter at the chosen aperture. Now check that the scene is within +/- 2 stops of that by reading delta stops across the entire scene. If the range is roughly centered and within +/-2 stops you are done. If within +/- 2.5 stops you could 1) choose to accept it, or 2) open the aperture 1/4-1/3 of a stop (best to overexpose by a tiny bit than underexposing IMO [but that's your choice in terms of what you want to achieve!]. If the readings point to a -1 to +3 stop range and so it's not centered, you adjust the shutter speed accordingly (shortening by half); if the readings point to -3 to +1 then you do the opposite, lengthen the exposure by a factor of 2. Adjustments of half a stop or less can be made by adjusting the aperture. If the reading is outside this window, say +/-3 stops or more then you either have to 1) use color neg 2) bracket 3) come back when there's better light (less extreme range) or 4) accept that you'll get something suboptimal (underexposed, overexposed, or both). Btw don't forget to compensate by the polarizer loss on top of that. And do not ignore the fractional reading of the meter (eg. It may say F22 and 5/10 so you need to change the aperture accordingly, slides don’t have large tolerance for error).

[Alan9940]

For the Portra, I'd meter the dark embankment area in the upper right and place that on a low zone that holds good texture. Then, I'd check the highlight areas just to see where they fall, but I wouldn't worry about 'em. For the E100, I'd use my Sekonic L-558 to average measurements between the dark embankment and highlights, then scan the entire scene with the meter to see where all the tones are falling in relation to this average reading. Based on this info, I'd make a reasonable exposure determination and bracket to be sure.

[jp]

Compensate for polarizer brightness loss. I kinda like seeing the clouds in the water though.
For portra make sure the shadows have adequate exposure for texture and take the photo.
For E100, determine if the range of brightnesses will fit into what E100 will handle.

All the zone stuff is for custom developing B&W film.

[Vaughn]

It will be fun to see the results with the polarizing filter. It should be able to take a lot of blue (cyan?) out of the reflected light coming from the sky. The play of the sunlight on the underwater plants is great.

[Drew Wiley]

It's actually an easy scene to meter with silicon spot meter like the Pentax. I've done it thousands of times. Darker green grass is a good substitute for a gray card, and lighter green grass like in the foreground is about a stop above. E100 needs to be exposed more accurately then Porta, and the results will be quite different. A spot meter will allow you to meter the stream highlights too. A polarizing filter just complicates things. If you meter through that it has to be at the exact angle to the sun and rotation position as on the camera itself. Smarter just to meter without it, and apply its official filter factor afterwards. But a polarizer could also kill a sparkly subject like that if overdone. I never use them.

When metering for color it's best to forget the Zone System and just think about deviance from box speed midpoint. With chrome film, you're only going to get decent color reproduction about a stop and a half above midpoint down to a stop and a half below. Porta will provide a lot more latitude at lower contrast, but with the penalty of less color saturation. Ektar color neg film will give you the saturation, with about half a stop more latitude either direction than Ektachrome.